Strawberry: holes eaten in leaves

What it is likely to be on strawberry

1. Vine weevil

   Candidate 1common on this plant

   ·source

   Sourced guidancehigh confidence

   • Royal Horticultural Society: Vine weevil

   Checked 2026-08-13

   Two quite different kinds of damage from one insect. The adults cut characteristic notches from leaf margins, which is unsightly and rarely serious; the grubs eat the roots underground, which kills the plant without any warning above ground until it collapses. Container plants are far more affected than open ground.

   Points towards it

   • · the adults feed at night and hide in the crown by day
   • · strawberries in pots and under cover are where vine weevil does most damage

   Argues against it

   • · slugs also eat strawberry leaves and leave a trail; weevils leave none

   Check this next

   Look at the leaf margin for irregular notches rather than holes in the leaf body — adult vine weevil bites semicircular pieces from the edge in a series, giving a scalloped margin. The notches themselves do the plant no harm; they matter because they say the grubs are in the compost, and on a container strawberry the grubs are what kills the plant.

   What to do now

   Treat the notching as a warning rather than a problem. Tip a pot-grown plant out and look at the roots for creamy C-shaped grubs with brown heads; if they are there, water pathogenic nematodes into the compost when it is above about 5 °C, which is late summer or early autumn. Notched leaves alone need nothing.

   ·source

   Sourced guidancehigh confidence

   • Royal Horticultural Society: Vine weevil — biological control

   Checked 2026-08-13

2. Slugs and snails

   Candidate 2common on this plant

   ·source

   Sourced guidancehigh confidence

   • Royal Horticultural Society: Slugs and snails
   • Royal Horticultural Society: Strawberries — pests

   Checked 2026-08-13

   The most destructive garden pest in a wet British spring, and the one surrounded by the most confidently repeated advice that does not work. They shred seedlings overnight and leave irregular holes with slime trails nearby.

   Points towards it

   • · a dried silvery trail on the leaf or the ground beside it is conclusive and nothing else leaves one
   • · irregular holes rasped through the leaf, often starting from the middle and with the veins left, is how a rasping mouthpart feeds
   • · they need damp conditions to move and feed, and damage follows wet spells
   • · the low outer leaves sitting closest to the ground and to the mulch are reached first

   Argues against it

   • · slugs and snails cannot move over dry ground and damage stops in a drought
   • · a visible insect or a tunnel between the leaf surfaces points at something else eating it

   Check this next

   Go out after dark with a torch, and look for trails by day. Slug and snail damage appears overnight, comes with dried silvery slime on the leaf or the soil beside it, and the holes are irregular with smooth rasped edges rather than neatly cut. On strawberries the decisive check is the fruit rather than the leaves — ripening berries hollowed out from underneath where they touch the ground is slug damage and very little else does it. On rhubarb the leaves are far more often holed than the stalks, which are unpalatable.

   What to do now

   Take the physical measures first, because they work and cost nothing: go out after dark on damp evenings and collect them, clear the damp hiding places — old leaves, boards, dense weeds at the bed edge — and on strawberries tuck straw or matting under the trusses so ripening fruit is off the wet ground, which is the single most effective thing available. Nematode biological control watered onto moist soil works well against slugs on a strawberry bed. If pellets are used at all, use ferric phosphate, sparingly and scattered thinly rather than heaped, and never near where pets forage.

   ·source

   Sourced guidancehigh confidence

   • Royal Horticultural Society: Slugs and snails — control

   Checked 2026-08-13

Narrow it down

This page lists everything at once, which is the right shape for reading and the wrong shape for deciding. The interactive tool asks one question at a time, starting with whichever would separate these causes fastest, and stops as soon as further answers would not help.

Opens with the plant and the symptom already set. Nothing you answer is stored or sent anywhere — the answers live in the address bar and nowhere else.

What this does not cover

These are the causes GrowingHQ holds rules for on strawberry — not every cause there is. Where several problems look alike, the honest answer is often that they cannot be told apart by eye, and a page that named one would be guessing. If none of the above fits, the general holes eaten in leaves page lists causes across all plants, and the Strawberry profile lists the problems it is prone to.